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Technology for
Today's Quality
Manager
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It's 20 minutes after six on a Thursday evening. You're working late preparing for a plant tour
tomorrow. The only saving grace of the unrewarded overtime is that you escape the drenching rains and gusting winds visible through your office window. Senior executives are
unhappy with the increased number of defects in your company's best-selling line. An important customer has contacted you to perform a specific, and obscure, statistical process
analysis--you're sure he read about it in some quality magazine and doesn't even know what it means. Nevertheless, you have a day to reply with an answer.
While still planning for tomorrow's plant tour, you're searching the Web for information about Weibull distributions. Your spouse is on the phone reminding you
of a dinner engagement tonight, a blinking light indicates yet another incoming call, and lightning flashes ominously outside.
Suddenly, with little more than a flicker, the entire city is without electricity. Sitting in the dark, you're free from distractions as you ponder what tasks you can still
perform. Your office phone and cellular phone are dead. To contact your family, you have no choice but to travel home. Your PC is useless. That question on
Weibull will have to come from your old college textbook. For the tour and presentation, you'll have to get out the dry-erase markers and white board. The
executives will just have to wait on the defect issue--lucky for you, they're very understanding, right? Wrong. In an instant, you're intensely aware of how important technology has become.
It's almost impossible to underestimate the impact of technology on business today. Electronics have been billed as timesaving devices that make tasks easy and
efficient. Instead, they have become required tools of the trade--if you're not using the latest technology to do things better and faster, consider that your competitors surely are. Net-working Any discussion of emerging and essential technology must start with the Internet.
Information available on the Web exceeds that available in any library or museum. Unfortunately, the Internet's very depth and breadth sometimes make information retrieval a daunting task.
Fortunately, a number of search engines exist to help find information on the Internet: Lycos, Yahoo!, Excite, Hotbot and many more. Infoseek.com is
especially easy to use because it allows nested searches (searches within searches). A search for the term "statistical" on Infoseek yields 366,292 pages. Add "process
control" and "Weibull" to the search criteria and the number of hits drops to 26. This method results in an efficient and accurate search, which saves time and yields workable results. Beyond using the Web as a reference tool, you can use it to disseminate information. Many of the latest software titles for document control, ISO 9000 and
SPC can export files into HTML. The Net-savvy quality manager will use this feature to post information that needs to be accessible to various co-workers,
customers or partners in various locations. The beauty of Web-capable quality software is that users on any computer platform can access the data.
This link between you and your colleagues and peers is further strengthened by the Internet's countless message boards and chat rooms, which cover most any
subject. You may be surprised how willing to help some people are. Even if you're not looking for specific information, the Web is still a great place to
find news relevant to quality management. Most of the search engines offer a "My Page" function that lets you tailor the page. Set this page to search for terms like
"SPC," "quality" or "manufacturing" and then select the page as your browser's home page. Every time you connect to the Internet, the day's news headlines
matching the selected criteria will be displayed. Quality Digest's home page ( www.qualitydigest.com
) also features quality-related news stories daily. You've got mail
E-mail is quickly becoming the communication channel of choice for people in nearly all sectors. Wireless technologies make it accessible almost everywhere.
Messages containing text, images and links can be saved, stored, printed and replied to. And the technology provides its own correspondence record. Further,
today's document control applications use e-mail to instantly route documents to everyone who needs to see them for reference or sign-off.
E-mail is so pervasive, however, that sorting and organizing messages can become grueling. Filtering and the ability to create separate personalities allows users to sort
mail by any number of factors (subject, date, sender and others). Image capture
"E-mail is a great way to send pictures and text, but you have to get that information into the computer first," says Greg Ferguson, a quality manager at
Parker Hannifin. "If you don't have it captured electronically--you lost the file or the original hard copy is from the days before computers--you need a scanner."
Flatbed scanners have become commonplace in most offices. Prices range from $75 to $9,000, but you should find a quality unit with all the necessary functions for
less than $300. High image quality requires two factors: a minimum of a 600 x 1200 dpi optical resolution and a 36-bit color sample depth, which are becoming standard for casual users.
To scan and transform printed materials into digital text files that can then be modified, you need optical character recognition (OCR) software. Most scanners
come with a basic OCR program. If text scanning is an operation you regularly perform, you may want to purchase a superior OCR application. Regardless, even the simplest OCR program beats retyping. Another characteristic that affects a scanner's usefulness is its ability to capture an image from a variety of media. Scanners best equipped for such tasks have two
scanning beds, one for flat items (papers or photographs) and another for transparencies and slides. Smile
Although some scanners offer increased depth of field for scanning 3-D objects, the best results come from a digital camera. Camera capabilities vary; you should
choose one that mirrors (or slightly exceeds) your needs. Resolution, size and zoom all affect a camera's value, but the most significant factor
that separates premier units from low-end units is memory. High-resolution images--especially in color--are memory hogs. Older cameras with removable flash
memory cards represent very dated technology; the newest cameras use drives and disks. Like much of today's technology, digital cameras' best feature is their speed.
Within 15 minutes of having requested an image of a defective part, a co-worker on the other side of the world can be looking at it via e-mail.
Turning over a new page Pagers are finding new uses in the quality arena. For example, a computer could
be set up to facilitate process control by automatically paging the appropriate contacts when a given process goes out of tolerance. Pagers used to be very
limited in their capabilities, but alphanumeric messaging changed much of that. Pagers with this technology can display text messages as well as phone numbers.
The messages can be sent through the service provider's Web site or called into services that transcribe and route them. Until recently, even alphanumeric pagers were one-way communication
devices--responses relied on wireless or landline phones. New technology, however, lets users send alphanumeric messages from pagers smaller than a deck
of playing cards. Motorola's new PageWriter 2000x, for example, can send custom messages to other one- and two-way pagers, fax machines and e-mail addresses from its 49-key lighted keyboard. Two cans and a string As the FCC continues to make more frequencies available, the quality and options
in voice transmission have greatly increased. Two-way radios today sound as clear as any wireless phone, but offer use without pricey wireless service charges.
Today's technology has kept two-way radios an inexpensive alternative to wireless phones while increasing their range to up to two miles. If you need to keep in
constant communication with employees on the shop floor or colleagues always on the go, two-ways provide an affordable wireless link.
Mobile telephony If you're still debating the analog vs. digital issue, you're already behind. But take
solace in the fact that an answer has been established: digital. According to Phillip Infotech's fall 1997 report, analog telephone technology "has always been plagued
by dropped calls and uneven voice quality. It is also a security nightmare." The latest revolution in digital mobile telephony has produced phone/hand-held
computer hybrids. For example, Qualcomm's pdQ Smartphone marries Internet, address book, calculator, date book, to-do list, memo pad, e-mail and expense
tracker capabilities with the latest in digital phone technology. Sprint recently introduced a suite of user-friendly wireless data products and
services, now offering customers Internet access through their Web-ready Sprint phones. You can now browse the wireless Web right from your phone without connecting via any cable or other device. Bon voyage to day planners As computers threaten to replace the need for printed material, personal digital
assistants (PDAs) may do the same for day planners. Annual sales of hand-held computers are expected to grow to more than 13 million units by 2001.
There are a number of such devices, but one platform is quickly becoming a standard: 3Com has essentially created the market by licensing its Palm Computing
platform OS to other manufacturers. "Palm-compatibles outsell other PDAs such as the Windows CE by something like 3-to-1," says Oliver King-Smith, president
of Tescina, which provides hand-held data acquisition solutions for the quality marketplace. A new PDA, expected to hit the shelves soon, promises to add new functionality
to the hand-held market. "Probably the biggest news in the hand-held world lately has been the emergence of a new com- pany called Handspring," asserts Smith.
"They've developed a more standardized hardware input, so there's now going to be a much larger range of hardware that can plug into those types of devices."
But you don't have to wait for Handspring's innovation to get more out of your hand-held. Tescina, for instance, offers Palm-compatible accessories that automate
data acquisition. Tescina's PocketLog software offers streamlined shop-floor data acquisition from analog and digital gages, a feature that eliminates many of the
errors associated with manual transcription. The application also adds barcode-reading capabilities to Palm OS hand-helds.
"Our other product, DataGet, is designed to retrieve data from digital gages," says King-Smith. "Just plug it into a caliper, micrometer or indicator and press a button."
A Palm isn't always necessary, however, even if data acquisition is a must. Several companies manufacture stand-alone data collection devices. DataMyte's new
hand-held 501 data-acquisition device offers many data-acquisition features in a compact package that weighs less than a pound. Many of the DataMyte products
are sealed units designed to survive harsh environments, including high temperatures and dusty processing facilities.
To make data collection even more seamless, Mitutoyo's Wireless Measure System eliminates messy, confining cables by transmitting data from the measurement device to the data collector. A light goes on As you stare out the window, you find yourself with a new perspective on the
electronics that litter your office. As the lights flicker back on, you settle in--it's already a late night, but it would've been a lot later without power.
Your pager lists three messages; an Internet search produces 26 hits for Web pages on Weibull; an e-mail from Japan explains that the customer tour has to be
postponed until Monday; and your spouse is on the phone, reminding you that you're already late for dinner. A quality manager in Singapore sends you a suggestion on the defect issue with
which you've been struggling. Digital camera and PDA in hand, you quickly run to the shop floor to gather a few quick part measurements. While that data is being
sent to your PDA via infrared port, you snap a few digital images of the defective parts. Back upstairs, you down-load the images from the camera to your PC, from which you e-mail them to Singapore. After an exhausting evening, you leave the plant at 8 p.m. On the short ride home your alphanumeric pager vibrates, indicating an incoming message. It's from the
quality manager in Singapore. "Have you worked up a Weibull distribution yet?" he asks. About the author Robert Green is Quality Digest's assistant editor. E-mail him at contact_us . |
